This post is dedicated to any OSGi developer who has endured the pain of wrapping a third-party JAR in order to deploy it to an OSGi container.

In this post we will deploy the FAST ESP Java Search API to CQ 5. Since Microsoft does not provide an OSGi bundle for this API, we will create our own using the technique described on the CQ Blueprints post, Deploying 3rd Party Libraries.

The high-level approach is as follows:

Download the FAST ESP Java Search API (version 5.3.0.6) from Microsoft Connect and upload it to your 3rd party Nexus repository. I assume that the readers of this post are familiar with Nexus and have their own repository.

Create a Maven project to create the wrapped version of API.

Deploy the wrapped version of the API to your Nexus repository.

Deploy the wrapped version of the API to CQ via the Felix console.

Add the wrapped version of the API as a dependency to your Maven project.

Update your CQ instance to allow sun.io to be exported as part of the Felix system bundle from the framework classloader.

Create a Maven Project to Build the Wrapped JAR

Create the following POM. Please note: the dependencies listed in the POM below were defined by trial and error. I had many unsucessful deployments to Apache Felix with failed dependencies. In the end, the list of embedded dependencies included Xalan, Xerces and Log4j. Most of the remaining dependencies, such as HttpClient and javax.* packages were satisfied by Felix. Actually, the only dependency that was not satisfied was the sun.io package. I solved this by allowing Felix to export and load the sun.io packages from the framework class loader.